Enron as art: We're all too familiar with the characters in a hit London play
Copyright 2010 Houston Chronicle
Published 06:30 a.m., Monday, January 18, 2010
After all the trauma Houstonians went through with the collapse of Enron in 2001, including the loss of jobs and life savings, it's hard to imagine that the financial disaster has been transformed into a hit piece of entertainment, a hip London play that will soon be coming to Broadway with an all-American cast. (Soon to be a major motion picture?)
That's the case with Enron, the creation of 29-year-old playwright Lucy Prebble and veteran director Rupert Goold. Described as “an epic tragicomedy” by the Times of London, the play has earned rave reviews and sold out its 22,000-seat fall run.
Convicted Enron CEO Jeff Skilling may be cooling his real heels in a federal penitentiary while appealing his sentence, but his British avatar, actor Samuel West, is the dominant figure in Prebble's script as a magnetic combination of villain and anti-hero. Prebble's first version of Enron was a musical, but the songs were eventually dropped, leaving a drama leavened with a madcap trading-floor dance number and actors costumed as ogres to represent Enron's festering debt.
The late Ken Lay is portrayed by actor Tim Pigott-Smith as a Southern patriarch, and former chief financial officer Andy Fastow, also imprisoned, is played by Tom Goodman-Hill as a charmingly slippery character.
According to the Times review, “somehow you find yourself rooting for the man [Skilling] who you know is going to cause the biggest corporate calamity in American history. Hoping, entirely against hope, that the Enron party doesn't have to end.”
Perhaps that reaction is possible from British audiences who can view Enron's demise with the historical distance accorded a work of Shakespeare.
One suspects that Houstonians would not so easily look past the real-life characters to embrace their stage counterparts if Enron ever comes to town as a touring production. It might take an acting tour de force to get local audiences cheering for the principals of this sad story.
One suspects that Houstonians would not so easily look past the real-life characters to embrace their stage counterparts if Enron ever comes to town as a touring production. It might take an acting tour de force to get local audiences cheering for the principals of this sad story.
On the other hand, we do have a history of forgiving, and rehabilitating, our most colorful rascals …
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